A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:25:23 · Surojit Chatterjee
[00:25:23] S0: Yeah. Great question. I think for us, you know, first few customers was probably the biggest hurdle, which is exactly what you were saying. Like, you know, why do should I believe you? Is your product fully built? The challenge is unless I touch your data, I can't really show you a product. So we had to figure out steps. Okay. We'll show you the product using lots of proxy data say we create. It's not exactly the same that it shows. Then we'll do very contained POCs and pilots. Right? Then we'll touch maybe a few production systems and keep the blast radius small. And so step by step, there are a few things we did early on that created a lot of confidence in our potential customers. We went and got all our certifications compliance done within the first few months. Right? Of course, some things take more time, but like SOC two, type one, type two, you know, ISO 42,001, GDPR, HIPAA, anything and everything. If you go to trust.mr.ai, you can see that anytime. A lot of people will tell me, oh, why are you doing all these certifications? But that investment really paid off. The other thing we there are architectural decisions we took that really helped and that those are hard things to do. Look, if you are building a consumer application, you'll build it on your cloud. Right? It's multi tenant. It's like deployment, etcetera, is much easier. It's fully under your control. Right? Enterprises are different. So we made our product in such a way that it can work and run on any cloud, fully containerized. It's much harder to do. Not only that, it can run on customer's private cloud, fully air gapped. It's very, very hard to do. Air gap means it cannot access any external service while it's running. It has to be fully contained inside their cloud. Right? All uses native services and then it can run within a box kind of. Right? That's what they need to know or they need to see to be sure, oh, you are not gonna create a security issue for them. Those are very hard things to do. Architecturally, a lot of investment is needed and very hard to do later on in your life cycle as a company. Because once you have built the whole product, then you have to go back and ripping it out and rebuilding, very difficult. So those were things for more than a year, we were under stealth. We didn't even build a website. That's our history.
00:27:53 · Surojit Chatterjee, Pablo Srugo
Because we wanted to build the product the right way and spend a lot of time doing all of this infrastructure. We built a whole governance layer where any PII, PHI gets auto redacted. Every agentic execution so our AI employees has teams of agents. Sometimes they're like forty, fifty, a 100 agents. Every execution is completely traceable. They're completely a lineage of every decision, right? Explanation of why some agent made a decision and then ability to take feedback and automatically kind of change their behavior. [00:28:26] S1: And how did you like this is kind of all the product side stuff that you do just to be enterprise grade, which I think is obviously critical, it's a necessary condition. But then tell me about the first Was it just relationship based where you maybe knew somebody at some enterprise and they just trusted in you? You kind of took that credibility and said, okay, I'm gonna leverage the time usefully to try and build something here and then they opened the door, like is that how you kind of got in? [00:28:48] S0: For us it was, I'll say a combination of some came through relationship, but many very serendipitously actually came through sometimes even a cold email, I kid you not, I have gotten cold email back, like reach out, hey, I see your vision, it's interesting, can you come and talk to us and show us what you got? One of our largest partners today came through a cold email. [00:29:12] S1: Let's dive into that. Like, were in stealth for a long time. What did you do for them to see what you were doing and and give you that cold email inbound?
00:29:12 · Pablo Srugo, Surojit Chatterjee
[00:29:12] S1: Let's dive into that. Like, were in stealth for a long time. What did you do for them to see what you were doing and and give you that cold email inbound? [00:29:19] S0: Yeah. So look, we didn't spend a ton in marketing at all. Spent very little. I think what has been instrumental for us is projecting our vision out effectively. We do a lot of work with influencers, analysts. So early on, Gartner and HFS Research and Everest Group. We're in the leaders bracket in Everest Group's H and T products for last three years, right, the entire life of our company. All those things help because people will see, oh, this is a credible player. We published a bunch of articles in say, Harvard Business Review, HBR, with some of our, advisors or other thought leaders in the industry and so on. I think creating that credibility is super important. That okay, you you are an enterprise player, you have built technology that is ahead of others. You won't steal my data. You understand what it is to play in the enterprise. So credibility and trust and reflecting that trust in in the product itself. So they can see, our customers can see everything I'm talking about manifest in the product really well.
00:29:19 · Surojit Chatterjee, Pablo Srugo
[00:29:19] S0: Yeah. So look, we didn't spend a ton in marketing at all. Spent very little. I think what has been instrumental for us is projecting our vision out effectively. We do a lot of work with influencers, analysts. So early on, Gartner and HFS Research and Everest Group. We're in the leaders bracket in Everest Group's H and T products for last three years, right, the entire life of our company. All those things help because people will see, oh, this is a credible player. We published a bunch of articles in say, Harvard Business Review, HBR, with some of our, advisors or other thought leaders in the industry and so on. I think creating that credibility is super important. That okay, you you are an enterprise player, you have built technology that is ahead of others. You won't steal my data. You understand what it is to play in the enterprise. So credibility and trust and reflecting that trust in in the product itself. So they can see, our customers can see everything I'm talking about manifest in the product really well. [00:30:28] S1: And then to explore a different piece, like, let's go on tactics. When you think about closing enterprise customers, what's one thing that you've done that has worked particularly well? Whether it's an outbound tactic or inbound? But just, you know, imagine I'm a I'm an early stage founder, I'm selling to enterprise, and I'm trying to get something here that I can copy and start implementing to just get more conversations going. What what would be like a top one that you've done?
00:30:52 · Surojit Chatterjee
[00:30:52] S0: The answer will be different for every company. For us, close small group conversations have been very useful, which is, you know, we host dinners with industry leaders, say CHROs and so on, right, in different cities. And these are small group conversations. Actually our sell is process is to not sell. We are trying to get people to think about agentic business transformation. And through that conversation, we get to know them, build relationship, and then that turns out into a commercial relationship over time. Enterprise sales process is long. You know, it may take nine months for a very large deal, seven figure. A lot of our deals are large $7.06 figure or large 7 figure deals per year, multi year, etcetera. So those things don't happen like, you know, it's not like a consumer, oh, I'll put my credit card, pay $10, forget about it for six months. Right? I may or may not use it. Enterprises are careful and it takes a long time to go through their entire process and so forth. So you have to have that patience. So to me, like building credibility, getting your name out, understand where it's ticking. For example, a lot of people spend a lot of time in large conferences. For us that was not the right approach. Like for example, if you go to a very large conference, right, 30,000 people showing up, you as a small company probably not noticeable at all. A lot of the attendees of these conferences also are not necessarily decision makers. Right? They may be junior folks in in enterprises. For us, the level of contracts we are signing requires like a c level buy in, and the c level folks are not necessarily just walking around in in a large conference floor. They're super busy. So how do you get to the right people in the right place is is important. One thing that I personally try to avoid is kind of formal and replicate what somebody else is doing. Right? Oh, somebody else is doing this, so I should go and do it as well. You have to find your own process and own method. Of course, it will change over time. Look, early days to today is a little bit different. Today we we do see kind of mid sized conferences that are useful for us, but very large conferences probably not yet that useful now. Right?
00:33:21 · Pablo Srugo
[00:33:21] S1: Let me ask you just a market related question because you're on the frontier of this. As you're talking to these enterprises about AI and AI agents specifically, where are you finding most or landing? All the way from the extreme of because of AI agents, I'm going to not hire any more humans or fire all the humans I have and just basically just purely AI agents. That's one extreme, unlikely, but just to draw the spectrum. And then on the other extreme, because of AI agents, I'm just gonna do way more, and I'm therefore gonna hire more humans and more AI agents, and just the output is gonna grow exponentially. Like, where on that spectrum do you think things land for most large enterprises based on your conversations?